Home › The Principles of Cookery › Devonshire Cake
Devonshire Cake
Put into an earthenware pan four pounds of flour, and rub well into it one pound of clotted cream or butter beaten to a cream. Add three-quarters of a pound of moist sugar, one pound of currants, a quarter of a pound of lemon-peel cut small, and a little nutmeg. Beat up two eggs, and add them to the mixture, with a pint of milk, a salt-spoonful of saffron steeped in boiling water, and a quarter of a pint of fresh yeast. The milk should be only moderately warm; if too hot the cake will be heavy. Mix all together, and cover till next morning, when it will be ready to put into tins which will hold about a pound and a half. Bake in a quick oven for an hour and a half. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient to make six cakes.
This is a yeast-raised saffron fruit bread rather than a creamed cake, and it is built on a baker's scale: 4 lb of flour yields six loaf-sized cakes. Halving or quartering it works cleanly.
- The hinge: milk temperatureThe original is right to warn about it. The milk and the saffron infusion should be lukewarm, no more than about 100F, or the yeast is damaged and the crumb turns dense and heavy.
- That quarter-pint of yeastA quarter of an imperial pint of fresh brewer's or barm yeast is roughly 5 oz, and it was weaker and wetter than modern compressed yeast. For 4 lb of flour use about 1.5 oz fresh yeast, or 4 teaspoons of instant dried yeast stirred through the flour.
- Imperial pintsA pint here is 20 fl oz, so about 2.4 US cups of milk. A salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, which is a generous quantity of saffron threads: a large pinch, steeped in a few spoonfuls of boiling water and cooled.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar; the grades sold ran from light to fairly dark. Modern soft light brown sugar is a close match; white granulated will give a paler, flatter-tasting cake.
- Clotted cream or butterClotted cream is roughly 60 per cent fat against butter's 80, so a cake made with cream is softer and slightly wetter. If you use cream, hold back a little of the milk until the dough comes together.
- OvenA quick oven is usually rendered as somewhere around 400-450F, which is too fierce for 90 minutes on a sugary fruited dough. Start at 400F for 15 minutes, drop to 350F for the remainder, and cover the tops with foil once they colour. The loaves are done at an internal 190-200F.
- Tins and risingTins holding about a pound and a half of dough sit between a 1 lb and a 2 lb loaf tin; fill whatever you use no more than about two-thirds. The overnight covered rise is the first proof; after scaling into tins give the dough a second rise until it has visibly domed, an hour or more, before it goes into the oven.
- Currants and peelWash and dry the currants, and toss the fruit and chopped candied peel in a little of the flour so they do not sink through the slack dough.
Saffron cake is the great regional bread of Devon and Cornwall, and Cassell's places it here as a household staple rather than a confection: leavened with barm, enriched with clotted cream, and set to rise overnight in an earthenware pan. The saffron is not decorative. It was a costly imported spice, grown in England around Saffron Walden in Essex until the eighteenth century and afterwards bought dried from Spain, and its yellow crumb marked the cake as festival food for Easter, harvest and fairs. The often-repeated claim that Cornish saffron cake descends from Phoenician tin traders is traditional rather than documented; what is certain is that by the nineteenth century saffron buns and cakes were an established West Country trade, and the recipe here gives a probable cost of 3s. 6d. for six large cakes.